Hypervisor requirements

Review the hypervisor requirements for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

To help ensure that backup and restore operations can be run successfully, your system must meet the hardware and software requirements. Use the following requirements as a starting point. For the most current requirements, which might include updates, see technote 2013790.

Hyper-V requirements

The Microsoft Hyper-V server must meet the following minimum requirements:

  • Hyper-V Server 2016 or Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016
  • Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019 (Clustering is not supported)

Backup and restore of shared virtual hard disks (shared VHDX) is not supported. For known issues and limitations, see https://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=ibm10843068.

All Hyper-V servers, including cluster nodes, must have the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator Service running in their Services list. Set the service to Automatic so that it is available when the machine is started.

Note: The DiskPart automount parameter must be enabled on the Hyper-V server. For more information about enabling the automount parameter, see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753703(v=ws.11).aspx.

Hyper-V servers can be registered using a Domain Name System (DNS) name or IP address. DNS names must be resolvable by IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. If the Hyper-V server is part of a cluster, all nodes in the cluster must be resolvable via DNS. If DNS is not available, the server must be added to the /etc/hosts file on the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus virtual appliance by using the command line. If more than one Hyper-V server is set up in a cluster environment, all of the servers must be added to /etc/hosts. When you are registering the cluster in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, register the Failover Cluster Manager.

VMware requirements

The following VMware vSphere versions are supported:
  • vSphere 5.5 and 5.5 update and patch levels
  • vSphere 6.0 and 6.0 update and patch levels
  • vSphere 6.5 and 6.5 update and patch levels
  • vSphere 6.7 and 6.7 update and patch levels

Ensure that latest version of VMware Tools is installed in your environment. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus was tested against VMware Tools 9.10.0.

Physical RDM (pRDM) LUNs are not supported for virtual machine backup and restore operations that involve VMware snapshot technology.